John Ivison: New RCMP commissioner speaks softly and ponders a broken force

New RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson confronts a broken police force

Since any Commissioner of the RCMP must be thoroughly versed in the art of denial, it was appropriate that Canada’s new top cop was embroiled in a controversy of his very own within five minutes of being unveiled.

“I didn’t say those words,” said Bob Paulson at a press conference, in reply to a reporter’s question about a meeting with the wife of Robert Fowler, the diplomat who was kidnapped in Niger and held in the Sahara for 130 days. Mr. Fowler has alleged his wife met with a senior RCMP officer who “slammed the table and pointed his finger across at her and said ‘if you think that as long as I’m in charge of this case, one red cent is going to be paid to release a couple of high muckety mucks, you’re out of your mind’.”

At the press conference, Mr. Paulson admitted he was the RCMP officer in question but he denied making the comments and characterized the meeting as “professional, cordial and respectful.” So that’s a good start.

The most pertinent question asked, was why Mr. Paulson wanted the job in the first place. In recent years, the Horsemen have been the subject of more scandals than Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi and the British Royal Family combined.

The appalling sexual harassment claims made in recent days by former Mounties Krista Carle and Catherine Galliford suggest an old boy’s culture that is stuck in the 1970s. Wikipedia has a separate entry entitled “List of Controversies involving the RCMP” – which in just the last decade has ranged from involvement in the Maher Arar case through the pension fund scandal, in which the RCMP misused millions of dollars from its own pension fund; and from the Ian Bush tragedy — Mr. Bush died from a single gunshot wound to the back of the head while in RCMP custody — to the Robert Dziekanski Taser case, in which the stapler-wielding Polish immigrant was tasered five times by four officers and later died.

Related

Wikipedia’s entry isn’t even exhaustive, ignoring as it does the dubious record of former Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, whose leadership on files such as the income trust case during the 2006 general election, the Arar case and the RCMP pension plan was questionable at best.

Neither does it touch on the troubled tenure of William Elliott, whose management style was criticized by senior officers who suggested he needed anger-management training; the botched Air India investigation and the mishandled Robert Pickton case.

This combined assault on the iconic status of Canada’s police force has left an indelible stain on the red serge. How many Canadians truly trust the RCMP after watching the four officers who tasered Mr. Dziekanski testify that he was violent and had to be wrestled to the ground, in contradiction of video evidence that showed he’d collapsed, writhing in pain, after the first shock? Disillusionment is so great in British Columbia that there are calls for the province not to renew its policing contract with the national force.

Mr. Paulson alluded to the task ahead of him when he admitted that the force’s reputation has been damaged “but I’m not prepared to say that the image has been tainted to the extent that there’s no hope.”

On the plus side for the new commissioner, the only way is up. He appears to be a good choice, after the failed William Elliott experiment. Mr. Paulson entered the force as a constable in Chilliwack, B.C., and over the course of the next 26 years worked his way up to the position of deputy commissioner, gaining experience along the way in organized crime, aboriginal policing and national security.

He is making all the right noises about accountability, initiating a probe into sexual harassment in the workplace as his first order of business.

In answer to another question, he said that he doesn’t yell or scream, unlike his predecessor. Let’s hope the force rewards the appointment of one of its own by performing better, giving Mr. Paulson no cause to raise his voice.

If the RCMP does show what it really stands for, it’s likely it will be rewarded by the Canadian public, which must be yearning to fall back in love with one of its most treasured institutions.